gh its Chief Justice the ineluctable decrees of the law.
Ordinarily even Marshall would not have found this achievement an easy
task, for there were difficult personalities among his associates. He
had in Adams's Cabinet demonstrated his faculty "of putting his ideas
into the minds of others, unconsciously to them," and of this power
he now made use, as well as of the advantage to be obtained from the
impending common danger.

The case of Marbury vs. Madison was decided on February 24, 1803, and
therefore fell between two other events which were immediately of almost
as great importance in the struggle now waxing over the judiciary.
The first of these was the impeachment of Judge Pickering of the New
Hampshire District Court, which was suggested by the President on the
3d of February and voted by the House on the 18th of February; the
other was an address which Justice Chase delivered on the 2d of May to
a Baltimore grand jury, assailing the repeal of the Judiciary Act and
universal suffrage and predicting the deterioration of "our republican
Constitution... into a mobocracy, the worst of all possible governments."
* Considering the fact that the President was still smarting from the
Chief Justice's lash and also that Chase himself was more heartily
detested by the Republicans than any other member of the Supreme Bench,
nothing could have been more untimely than this fresh judicial excursion
into the field of "manners and morals," and partisan malice was
naturally alert to interpret it as something even more offensive. The
report soon came from Baltimore that Chase had deliberately assailed the
Administration as "weak, pusillanimous, relaxed," and governed by the
sole desire of continuing "in unfairly acquired power." But even before
this intelligence arrived, Jefferson had decided that the opportunity
afforded by Chase's outburst was too good a one to be neglected. Writing
on the 13th of May to Nicholson of Maryland, who already had Pickering's
impeachment in charge, the President inquired: "Ought this seditious
and official attack on the principles of our Constitution and the
proceedings of a State go unpunished?" But he straightway added: "The
question is for your consideration; for myself it is better I should not
interfere."

* The account here given of Chase's trial is based on Charles
Evans's shorthand "Report" (Baltimore, 1805), supplemented by J.Q.
Adams's "Memoirs".

Pickering's trial began on March 2,